Opinion:I've got news for Tom: Innovation and jobs are not going to come from "university towns." In the real world, individual tenured professors assisted by transient teams of students, all working without the stress of knowing that failure will cost them their livelihoods, and all working around holiday schedules and summer breaks, are not going to create the new jobs that will sustain the middle class.

Eastman Kodak Co. is preparing to seek bankruptcy protection in the coming weeks, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would cap a stunning comedown for a company that once ranked among America's corporate titans.

The 131-year-old company is still making last-ditch efforts to sell off some of its patent portfolio and could avoid Chapter 11 if it succeeds, one of the people said. But the company has started making preparations for a filing in case those efforts fail, including talking to banks about some $1 billion in financing to keep it afloat during bankruptcy proceedings, the people said.

And in a somewhat related vein, an update on the cause(s) of the crash of Air France 447 and a paradox that's been discussed here before.

But the crash raises the disturbing possibility that aviation may well long be plagued by a subtler menace, one that ironically springs from the never-ending quest to make flying safer....(my edit)...when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what's going on. They'll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can't be trusted? What's the most pressing threat? What's going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers.

What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447Two years after the Airbus 330 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, Air France 447's flight-data recorders finally turned up. The revelations from the pilot transcript paint a surprising picture of chaos in the cockpit, and confusion between the pilots that led to the crash.popularmechanics.com

If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, let me suggest an idea that you might not have considered: You should learn computer programming. Specifically, you should sign up for Code Year, a new project that aims to teach neophytes the basics of programming over the course of 2012. Code Year was put together by Code Academy, a startup that designs clever, interactive online tutorials. Code Academy’s founders, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, argue that everyone should know how to program—that learning to code is becoming as important as knowing how to read and write. I concur. So if you don’t know how to program, why not get started this week? Come on, it’ll be fun!

Code Year’s minimum commitment is one new lesson every week. The company says that it will take a person of average technical skill about five hours to complete a lesson, so you’re looking at about an hour of training every weekday. That’s not so bad, considering that the lessons are free, and the reward could be huge: If you’re looking to make yourself more employable (or more immune from getting sacked), if you’d like to become more creative at work and in the rest of your life, and if you can’t resist a good intellectual challenge, there are few endeavors that will pay off as handsomely as learning to code.

But this isn’t only about you. Let’s talk about how all of us—our entire tech-addled society—could benefit from a renewed interest in coding. Over the past 20 years, and especially in the last five, computers invaded every corner of our lives. Most of us accepted their ascendancy with grudging tolerance; even if they’re a pain to use and don’t ever work as well as they should, these machines often make our jobs easier and our lives more enjoyable. Part of the reason we’ve all benefitted from computers is that we don’t have to think about how they work. In their early days, the only way to use a computer was to program it. Now computers require no technical wizardry whatsoever— babies and even members of Congress can use the iPad. This is obviously a salutary trend. I’ve long argued that computers, like cars, shouldn’t require technical skill to operate, and the easier that computers are to use, the more valuable they’ll be to all of us.

Yet the fact that any moron can use a computer has lulled us into complacency about the digital revolution. You can see this in the debates over SOPA, the disastrous Internet piracy bill that has been embraced by politicians because many of them simply don’t understand its technical implications. Or, as Thomas Friedman points out, consider the absence of any substantive topic relating to technology from the Republican presidential debates.

I noticed something similar in the summer, when I published my series about the robots that are poised to steal high-skilled workers’ jobs. I was surprised, during my research, to find that many people who are vulnerable to replacement by machines had no idea how quickly they could become irrelevant. Lots of people I spoke to insisted that their jobs required too much schooling, or relied on several “fundamentally human” skills, and would likely remain forever dominated by humans. (That’s what travel agents thought, too.) There’s bliss in this kind of ignorance, but it’s dangerous. You don’t need to know how a computer works in order to use it—but if you learn how computers work, you may avoid one day working for them.

"This new knowledge requires not just giant computers but a network to connect them, to feed them, and to make their work accessible. It exists at the network level, not in the heads of individual human beings."

Does his mean that the individual mind is relegated to that of one component making up a bee hive, metaphorically speaking? Is it (human mind) a "standing reserve" to feed technology's needs for the sake of itself? :) :)

fac: Petere, you may recall the by-the-numbers exercise we ran on this subject two years ago, taking into account the nominal velocity of propagation of RF and glass; an extension of the approach discussed in this article, beyond WAN/ metro/ access, is the in-building hybrid fiber-wireless LAN; I strongly suspect that rooftop (and window-shot) based infrared systems employing a simple on-off modulation scheme are even more suitable than multi-stage RF systems, if nanoseconds are being measured and shaved...